Michael Bogdanffy-kriegh—who is always worth reading!—has a good post today on the impact of some recent reading on his exercise patterns. I wanted to highlight one part to make a point somewhat unrelated to his own: "I have decided to focus on getting out of the house and going for walks (mind, body, earth, sometimes community) and winding up at local coffee shops, where I can have direct human-to-human contact (definitely community). Even if that contact is superficial banter with a barista whose name I know and who knows mine, it’s better than the social media app stand-ins we are plagued with. E... jabel.blog

@JohnBrady There really are some good ones. Needmore. And Buddha—which is pronounce booty! And Oolitic is pronounced “o-lit-tick”, despite the double o. It’s funny that you call East Oolitic a suburb, especially if you could see it. It’s always had the reputation of being the rough side of town. My father-in-law grew up there.

@jabel This is the backstory of Pixar’s Cars - and a big reason I love that movie. It may be a minor point in the movie, but the loss of America’s 1950s small towns to the highway/interstate system is something I feel deeply even though I’m not old enough to remember it. I mean, I probably have rose colored nostalgia glasses, but I love small town downtowns and not freeway exit strip malls.

@faithx5 I agree. Human scale seems to have been forgotten during that development boom.

@JohnBrady When I moved from St Louis to Los Angeles about fifteen years ago I drove out on old Route 66 as much as possible (it went through St Louis to Santa Monica). Sometimes this was basically a service road, sometimes a lovely detour through a small town, though most were decrepit by then and not cute, unfortunately. Sometimes it was impossible and you just had to drive the interstate. Still glad I at least tried to do it.

@jabel @faithx5 Thanks for writing this! We need more of these kinds of explorations/discussions of car-centered development and the impacts it has had and continues to have on towns and communities. But on the upside it gave us strip mall culture and architecture! Yikes.

It's an old story but worth calling attention to the many, many downsides we've accepted in our bargain with car-centered transport. Looking at the big picture of development in the US over the past 70 years it seems so inevitable and perhaps it was.

Perhaps we can begin to find a different way going forward. We certainly have some amazing examples being created in European cities, especially those in the Netherlands.

I live 8 miles from a smaller town of around 4,500. It's clung to some of it's small town culture and farming roots though in general I don't consider that a positive in terms of politics and general progress towards human rights. But it seems a common cultural thread for many of the small towns that survive in rural America... another subject entirely!

@Denny It's a love/hate relationship I have with this small town, that's for sure.

@jabel And even when planners mean well the process is plagued by unintended consequences. Some decades ago Raleigh decided to "revitalize" part of downtown by closing off traffic and making a pedestrian mall... and made a perfectly walkable desert. Because you had to drive to get there, and then you couldn't park; it didn't connect to anything. A town is much more like an organism than a machine, and ultimately the only way to fully control an organism is to kill it.

@dwalbert Yes! That's a very important point.

@Denny It’s probably a combination of things! I think car culture as it led to interstates/etc is probably a symptom of both hurry and individualism. We’d have to address those - lower them in our collective hierarchy of values - in order to meaningfully change car culture and its negative aspects.

@dwalbert Yes, attempts to do this now have to incorporate parking structures at the outset or it’s a no go. Or some kind of parking/shuttle system, but even then not everyone will want to use that. Because revitalized downtowns have become someplace to GO, not someplace to BE. That said, small towns always had a “someplace to go” aspect because of farmers, etc. There’s probably some nuance to the kind of “walkable” areas we look for now in cities versus the small town historically. (I’m thinking about this out loud right now and “whatabout-ing” myself, lol.)

@jabel Have you ever read A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al? Exploring principles of design, from towns down to rooms. I should read it again, probably, but it speaks to some of this in a really thoughtful and intriguing way.

@jabel thanks for the shout out! I am fortunate to be located in a small city, less than 20k residents, that is very walkable with a bunch of different options for walks both in town and in nature. It’s less bikable if you are trying to go any distance as it is bounded by busy roads with 45-50 mph speed limits and narrow shoulders. There is where we can use some improvement, whih is coming in the form of rail trails.

@dwalbert I'm not familiar with it but it does look interesting.

@mbkriegh We do have a rail trail, which is nice--and would be even better if it had more access points.